War. What is it good for?

You learn that it was Cleo Patrick from Egypt (the capital of which is evidently Paris) who fell in love with Mark Cuban of Rome.

You also learn that sentences really don't need fun things like verbs, that spelling is now officially optional, and that the comma is an endangered species.

One thing you can really learn from teaching history, though, is that the human capacity for violent war is pretty much unlimited.

The first war began when the very first limb fell from the very first tree. It was discovered by one of the very first humans. Picking up that limb and looking around surreptitiously, that human made the most obvious decision possible. He smacked another human upside the head with the very first weapon.

Wars have continued through the length of human history from that long ago day, but big old tree limbs and mud clods have been replaced by fun doodads like multiple launch rocket systems and nuclear weapons.

Now we are staring straight at a nation that has picked up a limb and whapped its neighbor upside the head. Vladimir Putin (a last name that you have to admit is kind of funny) has decided to go all Stalin on the Ukraine.

This should not have come as all that much of a surprise given that Putin (insert grin here) was trained in the KGB school of picking up limbs and bonking folks upside their skulls.

Furiously folks all over the world are Googling Ukraine to see where it is, if it matters, and if it was once ruled by Cleo Patrick. Some folks are even looking up from their texting while driving or taking a break from Candy Crush Saga to pay attention to the crisis for seconds on end.

As people rush to understand the conflict, sales of renowned military theorist Carl von Clausewitz' classic "On War" on Kindle have tripled (from one to three), leaving it only 6 million slots behind runaway bestseller "10-Day Detox Diet."

Sadly the crisis in the Ukraine is no laughing matter - a crisis that is tied to the troubled history of the region and to the personal whims of a Russian dictator who is the present incarnation of the myriad political failings of a long-enduring state.

As the world searches for mud clods to toss at Putin (insert grin here) it is a full understanding of history and circumstance that will act as our best guide forward.

The complex interrelationship between Ukraine and Russia matters - from the depths of the Crimean War to the shared misery of the many battles of Kharkov during World War II.

The lessons of the Cold War matter - from the falling of the Iron Curtain to the Prague Spring.

History cannot pretend to tell you exactly how to proceed in this or any other crisis, but understanding history is essential to making the best informed decisions.